How to set your practice team up for successful change

Use these five steps to help you organize and motivate your practice team to see changes through to
completion.

Make sure practice changes take hold

Organization of your practice is crucial to enabling transformation and will help everyone on your team stay
focused on the change initiative while still managing daily responsibilities with patients. A free online
module from the AMA’s STEPS Forward™ collection provides a framework for organizing your practice for
this type of change implementation.

An analysis of your practice should depend on these two basic questions:

A. Where are we now?

B. Where are we going?

Use these questions as you follow the five steps to organize your practice for change:

1. Perform a practice assessment. First, investigate your practice’s finances, personnel

management, productivity and morale, performance metrics, patient engagement, and any other
areas of your practice. Learning exactly how your practice team operates in the present will help you
design the future.

2. Develop and share a vision for your practice. Now that you’ve assessed all aspects of your
practice, consider where you want to go by asking:

• What are we trying to accomplish, and what are our goals for patient care and work flow?
• What do we want to be known for?
• What do we have to do to be successful as the payment system evolves?

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 Craft a shared vision of your practice with your team that defines where you are going—articulate this
vision and discuss it often. You can even use signs, posters or tag lines to constantly remind your
practice team that the entire practice is undergoing change together and moving toward providing
more efficient and higher quality care for patients. Keeping this information “front of mind” will help
your team stay motivated throughout the process.

3. Designate and train your change team. The change team should consist of three or four
individuals who have the interest and aptitude to manage and monitor the change effort. Make sure
these leaders have the time and resources available to do this while still meeting their patient care
responsibilities.

It is difficult to send the entire team out for Lean or Six Sigma Black Belt training, but you can help
train your practice team without expensive and time-consuming external training using the STEPS
Forward starting Lean health care and change-management modules.

4. Document your progress with a project management approach. Simplistic approaches to

project management go a long way toward reaching your goals. A project manager can aid in
resource allocation, foster accountability and help everyone on the team appreciate daily progress.

You do not need to invest in expensive project management software. Using a one-year wall calendar
to document milestones, responsibilities and resources can help keep the initiative on track and
ensure that no one’s time and effort are wasted.

5. Design systematic and sustainable changes. Changes to your practice will not take hold
immediately—patience is critical. To be successful in the rapidly changing landscape of the medical
world, your practice must develop a “measure … improve … measure” mindset.

Sustainable and successful change is a constant endeavor. Opt for long-term, systematic solutions
over quick “band-aid” fixes.

Following these five steps will help your practice team stay involved not only in the big picture of your change
initiative but also in each short-term goal that is set. If you have not yet selected a change initiative to
alleviate the needs of your practice, check out these three steps physicians have offered to help your
practice successfully choose the changes that will improve your efficiency and the quality of patient care.

Check out the module to dig deeper into how the organization of your practice can help your team work
together to implement changes efficiently. This module offers continuing medical education credit.

Adapted from AMA Wire®

To read more, go to ama-assn.org/go/wire

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